Humor

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Being a writer requires expending a great amount of Hope, and nowhere more so than the submission/rejection process that comes from sending your creative efforts off to complete strangers who may or may not use the pages of your manuscript to practice intricate origami designs or reenact their high-school “final buzzer” basketball fantasy. No, after all the slaving you’ve done over your masterpiece of literature, spending endless and sleepless nights fretting over arcane obscure grammatical by-laws, or developing long drawn-out backgrounds of insignificant characters with skeletons in the family closet and deep hidden secrets that no one will know, you have to hope that some slush-pile reader isn’t going to “flash scan” your labor of love while munching on a bagel and then check off the “not suitable for our needs” box on the form letter without explanation required -- end of story. Literally.

Take, for example, my last publishing venture, which I fondly refer to as the “Epic Saga With an Option for a Movie Trilogy” experience The periodical for which I was dealing with shall go unnamed in the event I get overcome by some arson binge and attempt to burn the printing house down. Ordinary folk might judge me a bit too harshly given the extremity of that last statement, but then, “ordinary folk” don’t understand a writer’s angst, or the she-bear protectiveness that comes out when it comes to the birthing, nurturing and caring of a Creative Baby. We, the Writer’s Collective, forgive you in your ignorance of this feral writer’s trait, and only ask that you attempt to understand to the best of your mundane ability.

The genesis of this project started with a simple query. Understand, it is always better to query first and write later than to write first and query afterwards. Invariably, they’ll ask you to slant your piece to fit their readership with a voice that matches their special style, and so you’ll end up rewriting it from the start anyway. So why not start from scratch with a good outline from the outset and save yourself some stress? That’s what the Creative Muse voice tells me, anyway, and she’s much more fun to listen to than the Ghengis Khan Editor voice, but we’ll explore more about that never ending rivalry and conflict later.

As I was saying, the query: this is the first whimper that a writer squeaks out to some heartless troll editor (Muse’s words, not mine; I like editors, really) which says, in essence, “Dear Editor: Here’s an idea, I hope you like it, whattya think? Yours, with a gun to my head, The Writer.” Now, for a writer to survive any length of time in this business, the attitude must be to expunge all expectation for any kind of positive response and move on to the next bit of business. This leaves only Hope remaining for the writer to hang onto during those interminable response times which are typically around 6-8 decades.

By some strange alignment of planets, or some alien additive to the drinking water, I received a communication in not too agonizing a time frame from a publisher that they viewed my query favorably and would like to read the manuscript as soon as possible. This led to a grand celebration between myself, The Muse and Ghengis Khan the Editor which was akin to a Mediterranean Wedding, including a great deal of plate smashing and Zorba the Greek dancing. It was during the frenzied destruction of a gravy boat that Ghengis starting fretting about not having a manuscript to send, and they wanted it right away, and we have a lot of work to do, and we shouldn’t have sent the query without a finished copy in hand from the outset, and much more garbled muttering which I couldn’t make out since The Muse and I stuffed a sock in his mouth and locked Ghengis in the broom closet and danced the rest of the night away doing our best Anthony Quinn imitations.

The Muse and I took the next morning and together we composed a beautiful manuscript with which we were both pleased and giddy about, and finally it was agreed that Ghengis could be let out of the closet to have a go at it. True to his calling, he tore up the innocent first draft, slahsing here and ripping out there. The Muse became such the drama queen, making such a howling and caterwauling to even the most insignificant comma being deleted, as if her own limbs had been torn off, that we finally had to stuff a sock in her mouth and give her a turn in the broom closet. I swear I saw Ghengis smirk. Then there was nothing left to do but to send off our pristine but Spartan script to The Troll and hope for the best.

After a period of endless second-guessing, blaming each other for imagined blemishes or misakes, squawking, bickering and hands-wringing, eventually I was wishing I had two closets to stuff the both of them into. Finally, the long awaited manuscript came back from The Troll like the proverbial Prodigal Son: starting its journey young and wide-eyed, returning a bit worse for wear but worldly-wise from its long sojourn, to return once again to the homestead from which it had been conceived and born. Or so The Muse rhapsodized about the manila envelope I held in my trembling hand, the life or death of our Literary Baby held in the featherweight of a single piece of 40% cotton bond paper with some toner sprayed across it in a very specific pattern. We all held our collective breath as the envelope was opened, and I gave a small yelp as the paper cut that slashed across my thumb blossomed into a crimson ribbon of pain. The others were quite concerned with the arrangement of the toner pattern sprayed across the page than my personal plight. The ingrates.

“Dear Contributor…” to say you could hear a pin drop could not adequately characterize the moment: an anvil could drop and no attention would be paid to it. “We are pleased – “ the celebration broke out into an Irish jig and was in full swing even as I continued reading. “…acceptance contingent upon suggested changes….” Dance, dance, dance, “…see attached sheet for….” Dance, dance, dance, “…return as soon as possible…” dance, dance, Huh? “Yours Truly, The Troll.” I have to give credit to the writing team. Rather than attempt to defend their work, they realized that The Troll was, after all, master of his domain, with the power of an Oracle to bespeak what will be acceptable to fill the pages of his magazine and what will, in turn, pacify his hungry readership. The two of them buckled down and reviewed the returned manuscript with its many and varied red slashes upon it, which Ghengis took in stride with only a small amount of head-pounding, and as they listened to me read the commentaries on conceptual execution, The Muse nodded sagely as if it had been handed down via a tattered parchment scroll from Ancient Wisdom Incarnate. A revision was made with no one sentenced to the broom closet, and our Creative Child was sent off once again with a cheery farewell and high expectations.

Big mistake.

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